1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to preparing artificial teeth, and more particularly, to a method of preparing a digital model and an artificial tooth applied to dental implant.
2. Description of the Related Art
When a dental implant surgery is done to a patient, after the patient's osseointegration and wound healing, it is necessary to prepare artificial tooth/teeth to complete the whole course of the surgery. A conventional method of preparing the artificial tooth/teeth is to let the patient bite a mold made of silicon to form an oral bite mold and then an oral model is produced based on the oral bite mold. Next, the oral model is sent to a dental technician for production of the artificial tooth/teeth. In the production of the artificial tooth/teeth, an abutment or a dental bar needs to be finished before a dental crown and a dental plate are prepared. However, such production of the artificial tooth/teeth is very time-consuming because a dentist needs to send the silicon mold or the oral model to the dental technician and then the technician also needs to prepare the abutment or the dental bar before preparing the dental crown and the dental plate.
An oral 3D digital scanner is commercially available for directly scanning the patient's oral cavity to acquire oral digital data, replacing the process of acquiring the patient's bite mold, such that the production time and cost can be saved. However, such scanner can only be applied to the general production of the artificial tooth/teeth other than to the patient treated by the dental implant surgery.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,555,403 disclosed a method for reconstructing data associated with an obscured finish line; the method is based on the obscured finish line to create trimmed virtual models or trimmed physical models.
In the aforesaid patent, the digital model or artificial tooth can be acquired only when the natural dental abutment or artificial abutment is available within the scope that the artificial tooth is to be prepared. If the natural dental abutment or artificial abutment is not available within the scope that the artificial tooth is to be prepared, the scanning can be done only after the artificial abutment is installed. In this way, the process of preparing the artificial tooth becomes complicated and the patient needs many diagnoses to complete the whole course of treatment, thus being very inconvenient.